Controlling Car Rental Spend With Car FOLIO

Even with the dominance of ride-sharing services, car rentals remain a major business travel expense for many organisations around the world, particularly where ground transportation may be away from major urban centres, or require multiple days of vehicle usage. As such, many organisations have negotiated relationships with vendors to provide preferential rental rates, as well as additional complimentary services such as unlimited miles, included damage waivers, and vehicle class upgrades. Combining these benefits could potentially save hundreds of pounds for a week-long rental. 

One of the challenges faced by organisations is how to effectively manage and police these agreements. When travellers submit their car rental expenses for reimbursement, they often just enter the total rental cost, along with a receipt image or PDF. The receipts themselves will contain a full line-item breakdown of charges, but employees submitting them as expenses don’t break them down by line item, and expense automation solutions haven’t previously typically had the ability to parse and map individual rental receipt line items. As a result, travel managers have had to manually pore over every rental receipt to verify that the negotiated rates and benefits were being honoured. It was a time-consuming and often fruitless process, but one which could potentially cost organisations hundreds of thousands of pounds if not done.

Related: Banishing the Hotel Bill Nervous Breakdown

We’re excited that this is now a thing of the past for Chrome River customers, as we are adding car rental receipts to our FOLIO offering. When an employee uploads the PDF rental receipt, or forwards the rental company’s email to their Chrome River wallet, the system will automatically identify that it’s a car rental based on key characteristics. It then extracts key data fields, such as daily rate, taxes, additional mileage fees, and damage waivers, and will create a separate, categorised line item within the overall rental expense. This enables organisations to easily spot rentals which contain fees outside the negotiated rate. In addition, this fee data can be analysed on an organisation-wide basis, which can be used to either reclaim these fees periodically, or to provide support for future negotiated rates.

Car FOLIO is available immediately for all Chrome River customers who subscribe to the Chrome River FOLIO service, providing even greater cost control capabilities. And as it’s an automated solution, it enables us to further humanise work for both business travellers and finance teams, reducing manual data entry and enabling them to focus on what matters most.

Learn more about Chrome River FOLIO and how it can streamline hotel and car rental receipt challenges here. Chrome River customers should contact their customer success manager for more details.